Quote Originally Posted by Noah View Post
OK the fluctuation due to natural market forces, supply & demand, doesn't faze me. And the first two centuries of our nations founding, when we used silver & gold as money, saw very little inflation or fluctuation. I once saw a graph of this; was virtually a flat line until central banking came along. It's the other type of depreciation that bothers me.

Yes, I'm thinking a database of the NON-debased coins, shikamaru.
But, it does.
The purchasing power of coins did not change much, but availability does change and quite markedly.

If you will look to U.S. history, there were many speculative bubbles, boom and bust cycles which occurred despite the usage of a bimetallic standard.

War is one of the best ways of rapidly draining a country of its metallic units of exchange.
This moves government to use paper (bills of credit) in order to allow commerce to occur.